THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 7, 2014
21
millennials," Schwartz said, gesturing at
the crowd. "The first generation that
was not eager to get behind the wheel
of a car." He added that he would be
omitting from his presentation the idea
of collecting tolls from bikers---an early
misstep that had cost him support from
the cycling community. "I thought I
would be greeted with greater warmth,"
he said. "But maybe it's my personality."
The rebranding has a personal ele-
ment as well. "I call myself Multimodal
Man," the engineer formerly known as
Gridlock Sam said, mentioning that he
uses every available mode of transporta-
tion, except for a scooter. "As you can
see, I travel with a MetroCard and a
fob." He reached into his shirt pocket
for the card and then his pants pocket
for a Citi Bike key. "It solved a prob-
lem that we have wrestled with in New
York City since the eighteen-sixties:
the crosstown problem," he said of the
financially challenged bike-sharing
program, and cited a hundred-and-
fifty-year-old Harper's Weekly article
in which, as he put it, "a seasoned cap-
tain said that he'd rather go out into a
squall in the Atlantic than cross Fifth
Avenue at noon." But, like many riders,
Schwartz had grown frustrated with
Citi Bike's frequent glitches. When
asked how he'd arrived at the restau-
rant, he replied, "I schlepped."
---Ben McGrath
O.D. to play a Nirvana show, in 1993,
and where, in 2000, Fiona Apple had a
spectacular mid-performance meltdown
and fled the stage will be no more.
For Gaga, the farewell shows mark
her first time ever on the Ballroom
stage. "It's basically the only room in
the city I haven't played," she said the
other day, during a break in rehearsals
for the twelve-song performance.
Playing in New York clubs was "where
I learned to be bold," Gaga said, as the
dancers took a break in the back. She
paused, shaking out her white wig. "You
have to learn to be unafraid when you're
a nobody, because you're going to be re-
ally fucking afraid when you're a some-
body and all the lights are on you." Al-
though she rarely plays clubs or theatres
anymore, "when I'm in an arena or a sta-
dium, I always need to have that bar con-
nection, that club mentality and energy."
She went on, "You start by singing
to yourself. And you go, 'I sound good.'
And then you think, But do I really
sound good? And to find out, you have
to put it in a room."
She put it in the room at the Bitter
End, the Village venue where she per-
formed in public for the first time, aged
fifteen, as Stefani, her given name.
"You sing a song and people start sing-
ing it back to you," Gaga said. "But how
do they know the song? Why are they
dressing like me? So you begin to un-
derstand the potential of what music
can be."
From there, she put it in the room at
Arlene's Grocery and at Rockwood
Music Hall, on the Lower East Side,
where the Lady Gaga performance-art
persona first appeared. She would re-
hearse in her tiny apartment on Stanton
Street, with turntables on the stove
burners. One night, performing for
thirty people in Rockwood's cramped
space, her mentor and collaborator
Lady Starlight said, " 'Gaga, look out
the window.' And there were a hundred
people on the street with cameras tak-
ing pictures!"
She also learned to sell herself in
rooms. "You have to have the ambition
to impress the guy who is going to
have coffee with Puffy in the Hamp-
tons that weekend," Gaga said. "Why
should he give you that million-dollar
check? So you open your mouth and
hit that note that sends vibrations to
his core in a way that blows his mind
and makes him want to be the one to
say, 'I found her.' "
The dancers floated back onto the
Ballroom floor, and Gaga ran through
"Bad Romance," puffing like a miler
when the number ended; she was a lit-
tle under the weather. ("I had my si-
nuses vacuumed out this morning.")
The room seemed to like what it heard.
Playing Roseland, Gaga said, was al-
ways a dream. As a young fan, she
couldn't afford tickets. She did manage
to win freebies to a Franz Ferdinand
show during her senior year of high
school at Sacred Heart, and she got her
nose broken in the mosh pit. She tried
to reduce the swelling with cold beer
purchased with her fake I.D. (Dela-
ware), but her mother got the story out
of her. After that, "my mom and dad
didn't want me going to Roseland---
what a shocker, right?" Once her career
took off, with the release of "The
Fame," in 2008, she went from small
places to big ones, and bypassed Rose-
land altogether.
Her parents, Cynthia and Joe Ger-
manotta, were on hand to watch the re-
hearsal. Although they no longer wor-
ried about their daughter getting her
nose broken, talk of Cobain's show and
his subsequent suicide and the price of
fame clearly pained her mother.
"He just didn't want to be famous,"
Gaga said, with a shrug. Apparently,
that isn't her problem.
---John Seabrook
Lady Gaga
1
FINAL ENGAGEMENT
IN THE ROOM
Roseland Ballroom is the latest (but
surely not the last) of New York
City's storied music venues to close its
doors. Lady Gaga's seven-show run,
which began last Friday, on her twenty-
eighth birthday, will be the final one at
the Fifty-second Street theatre, which
has been at its present location since
1958, when it took over a building that
once housed the Gay Blades Ice Rink.
The three-story structure, with its Art
Deco bar, will soon be razed and re-
placed with a fifty-nine-story residential
tower.The place where Kurt Cobain
miraculously recovered from a near